Town, or Man About Town as it was sometimes called, had a decade-plus run of being an extraordinarily influential British men’s style magazine. Founded in 1952 with an irreverent tone to cover subjects of interest to aspiring playboys, the magazine promoted topics such as food, fashion, beautiful women, parties, gentlemanly sports, and more. As the years went on, the focus fell more heavily on increasingly sexualized pinup pictorials in an effort to keep up with the competition in men’s magazines at the time (thanks to being purchased by a much larger media company some years earlier, which I think we’ve all learned by now is generally a very bad thing). Readers who had enjoyed the magazine as a respite from the trashiness of other men’s magazines on the market grew increasingly unhappy with the increasing prominence of boobs on each cover, probably because it made for really uncomfortable reading on the train to work every day, and circulation declined until the magazine officially went under in 1968.

Even in the year 2018, this is the exact kind of woman that my brain defaults to picturing if someone were to say “Hot English Woman”. I imagine the sexy effect of her wriggling out of the bag is somewhat diminished by the *plop* *plop* of little boxes falling to the floor.

Sadly the cover model goes uncredited.

This being a Christmastime issue, the amount of alcohol ads in this one make last week’s Tatler look like Zoobooks. While I imagine there’s a slight uptick in the amount of liquor ads over the usual, I’m not inclined to believe that it’s significantly more. British lifestyle magazines of the 60s were just this boozy.

If you’re trying to remember where you know the name Duff Gordon, it’s because of a few rich asshats who survived the sinking of The Titanic. This sherry makes an excellent bribe to get into your own personal lifeboat!

Trog, the pen name of Wally Fawkes, is a dedicated cartoonist who has been in residence for about every British newspaper between the late 1940s and his retirement in 2005 (he’s still kicking today at the age of 94).

Damn, that’s harsh. People apparently thought that Prince Phillip was a total dick even then.

I wish this was no longer relevant.

This would have hit the press about five minutes before historical events made this in exceedingly poor taste. Whoops.

I’m guessing that’s supposed to be Charles de Gaulle. I’m not totally sure of what he did to merit this, but when do the English need a reason to hate on the French?

Hardy Amies was an extremely influential British men’s fashion designer and official dressmaker to Queen Elizabeth II for 35 years.

Knitted ties had a major comeback just a year or two ago.

The writer of this article sure knew how to describe the way that clothes fit men, if you catch my drift. “Gay blade” indeed.

“Daddy, will you get us a pony for Christmas?”

“Oh no, I’m afraid that the pony lives here, Eddie.”

“My name isn’t Eddie, daddy, it’s Albert, and mummy says that if you were ever around you would know that.”

“Well then, uh, Georgie, which of these ponies do you want?”

“My name is Albert, daddy.”

A really great piece by Katharine Whitehorn, who is not quite considered a feminist writer but made her long career out of essays like this one, which cast a watchful and critical eye on the changing role of women in and out of the household. Whitehorn’s observations of Christmas as an adult include:

• you’re free to join in talking shit about your relatives with other relatives.
• you can follow up the present opening frenzy on Christmas morning with a nice long nap.
• you can make whatever you want for dinner, hell you can buy half of it already made if you want and nobody will care.
• you can get wasted and play lots of dumb parlor games with other equally wasted adults, after the kids have gone to bed.

So, you know, that’s pretty great.

On this week’s segment of Quirky British Culture: Swan Upping! Swan upping, from what I can understand, is the annual tradition of going up the Thames and gathering up the wild swans on the river to discern which swans belong to the Queen and which swans belong to certain ancient corporations. Traditionally, they were marked by notches in their beaks (1 notch for one company, 2 notches for the second company, no notches for the Crown). This has evolved over recent years to be more of a census-taking and monitoring of the swans, and is now treated as an educational community event that emphasizes introducing children to wildlife conservation (they now put rings around the swan’s necks instead of hurting their beaks). This has been going on for something like 700 years now, and most puzzling for this article, always in the third week of July. So what an article about hanging out in a boat with the Royal Marker of the Swans at the summer swan festival is doing in the December issue of this magazine, I can’t say.

So now that we all know what Swan Upping is, read this piece about the experience of one journalist who found it to basically be the most rugged and manly sport that ever involved wrestling a docile swan into a rowboat. The men in the boats immediately pronounce the journalist to be a complete wuss and threaten to call him Doris. It’s great fun.

Yes, in the first paragraph they quote the temperature in Fahrenheit and not Celsius. That is weird. Just like in Tatler, apparently it’s very unfashionable to have Christmas at home and not in some exotic destination, so they lead off with “If you MUST be here instead of on a beach in Australia, here’s what the theater scene is up to”. And some very fine names are dropped, including Maggie Smith and Peter O’Toole. If you are BURDENED with a pack of squirming little brats over the holidays, you can always take them to the panto, which from what I can discern is kind of like really shitty community theater for six year olds with A-list celebrities inexplicably involved.

Holiday movies include the premiere of Bye Bye Birdie, starring “much touted new sex symbol Anne-Margaret”. There’s also some Peter Sellers movies coming out that you’ll probably forget about in a week: something about a pink cat, some silly B-movie about a mad scientist.

“Hello, do you have Aquascutum?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Aquascutum, I daresay the Prince of Wales has it and so should you.”

*click*

Thankfully this shoe ad manages to find ways to be descriptive about the color of leather shoes without being horrifically racist about it, which is not something I thought I’d ever be congratulating, but I’m still recovering from Tatler last week.

In so many words, they’re selling you this suit by virtue of it being uninteresting and because it’s what you’re expected to wear. CONFORMITY: THE FABRIC OF OUR LIVES.

Try saying “Sherrifico!” out loud without sounding absolutely sloshed.

They put as much effort into this ad as it took to turn the other bottles facing away. Good work, lads, quick shoot, let’s go back to drinking.

She looks a bit mussed, but that could just be her terribly unflattering hairdo (and normally I adore a good bouf). Do you think this photo suggests post-snog or post-shag? I’m thinking post-snog, pre-shag. You know, those few intervening moments when you want to take a breath and get some candy and worry privately if she’s fantasizing about kicking you down a flight of stairs (you also read Tatler).

I love the colors and shapes here. I also love that the chocolates aren’t even in the photo.

Flake or rubbed out? You may commence the giggling.

Cocktails to dilute your precious liquor with!

These descriptions are really worth the trouble to read, as they are quite droll and snarky.

A hilarious piece on cocktail parties written by Anthony Haden-Guest, half-brother of Christopher Guest and, from what I can tell, a lifelong writer of snarky essays about throwing cocktail parties. I would absolutely love to see this acted out in a video about throwing holiday parties. Idealy starring the cast of Mad Men.

Try these icebreakers out on your next Tindr date and let me know how that goes. I’m particularly a fan of “Whatever happened to Felicity?”, which could go in so many wonderful different directions.

Ah ha, thought you’d get this far in a 1960s magazine without seeing MAN used as an adjective, eh? Come on down to Michael’s MAN boutique, which I don’t believe is in the business of selling MEN but you’d be misled from the ad. If you slip a few quid to Nigel at the counter he’ll sell you some real man in the stock room, if you know what I mean.

As for whatever became of the twist, it didn’t take long for alcoholics to realize that opening screwtop bottles of wine when already drunk led to far less accidental stabbings with the corkscrew. This invention skips all of that and goes straight to murder weapon.

The Burberry brand has been around since the 1850s, but even in this era they were still only known for their men’s coats. It wouldn’t be long until their popularity as a luxury brand would explode in the 1970s to what we recognize as their brand today.

I find this to be rather homoerotic. Is it just me?

A very short and terribly written piece on the stage debut of actress Isla Blair, who has gone on to be an established British stage and character actress.

And now, a lavish five-page full-color advertising bonanza for Daiquiri Rum, because we know who’s really keeping the lights on at Town magazine.

I love ginger ale girl’s expression of bored contempt. Soda girl’s face is conveying to me that there isn’t nearly enough rum in this rum and soda, possibly in all of London, to find this man funny.

I can’t get over the implication that if you don’t want to drink the whole full sized bottle in one sitting, you can “half unwind” and drink a smaller bottle (all in one sitting).

There’s an interestingly loaded choice of words here in “approve”. Don’t worry, man fans, it’s still a scotch FOR men, but women also like it – just like they like you!

What the hell is even happening in that top paragraph? How drunk ARE these people?

Whenever you’re feeling down about yourself, just remember that somewhere in England in 1963, someone was paid to write…whatever this is.

Around this time it seems that over in the American magazines they can’t get enough of dacron and modal and other polyblend fabrics, but here it’s just wool. Know what we’ve always had? Wool. Wool’s good. Wool comes from sheep, and we like sheep. What else can we do to sell wool? Put a blonde lady in a man’s shirt and make her stand around, frowning impatiently? Write a totally incoherent bit of prose that just alludes to breasts over and over again? That’s good. That’s enough for today.

This is clever. I like it.

Squires Gin – coming to you with a drunken Dutch angle!

Sometimes you don’t have to do much to sell an ad. Sometimes it just looks nice. This is one of those times.

How much of this do you have to drink before you start asking the bartender for a “Cheery herring”? This makes my brain slur.

Try ordering “Asbach Uralt” with a straight face when sober, much less already drunk.

The back cover is reserved for Grand Mariner. Pictured serving size: one.

 

 

That’s it for this week! Hope the hangover’s kind to you. Next week we’ll be looking at the future feminists of America with Ms. magazine, June 1974!

(not my picture)